January 24, 2006

by Andrew Silow-Carroll

Holocaust Museum Watch Watch

What's missing from the New York Sun's coverage of "Holocaust Museum Watch," Avi Weiss' latest attempt to discredit another Jewish institution? As Jim Besser describes in his dispatch this week, it is the peculiar irony that Weiss would want the U.S. Holocaust Museum to become MORE involved in Mideast politics:

A group affiliated with AMCHA: The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, the group created by activist Rabbi Avi Weiss, is demanding that the
Museum attack anti-Semitism in the Arab and Islamic world and change
its exhibits to document Arab support for the Nazis during World War ll.

It was Weiss who insisted that the Museum should have no current
political role when, in 1998, the State Department tried to get
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat invited to tour its Permanent Exhibition.

But maybe the Sun has lost its ear for irony. You don't want to refer to a three-person outfit like Holocaust Museum Watch as "a national organization," especially when Weiss protege and HMW spokesman Shmuel Herzfeld calls his shul the National Synagogue.